Iran accuses CNN of training hackers
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman accused the cable network CNN of "officially" training people to "hack government and foreign ministry" websites on Monday, citing a CNN.com article that explained how hackers were launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Iranian government sites.
"They officially trained the people to come and hack Iran's government websites," spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said during a press conference, according to CNN.com. "This is a cyber war. This, with, isn't it a cyber war of the media with an independent government? They asked people to use the DOS system to hack our websites."
The network responded on its website Monday in a statement, calling the accusations "completely false" and stating that "CNN is beholden to no government in its reporting."
Some Iranians had been using Twitter to launch DDOS attacks on Iranian websites. Richard Stiennon, a network security consult, said he had seen messages on Twitter that included links that could directly launch DDOS attacks, which can overwhelm a website with repeated requests.
Many commentators on Twitter and blogs are cautioning that participating in cyberattacks could end up backfiring and hurting Iranian dissidents by slowing down or disabling the country's internet connections.
One Twitterer posted a message Monday that said: "Please, surgically hack bad sites in Iran, NO DDOS! DDOS only harms freedom fighter bandwidth."
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